


you're the only north star (dear god)

by spiekiel



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Space, Established Relationship, Kidnapping, M/M, Protective Derek, captain!Derek, love sex, smugglers, space criminals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-28
Updated: 2014-11-28
Packaged: 2018-02-27 07:03:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2683697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spiekiel/pseuds/spiekiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I will go to the ends of the known universe, I will dive through a fucking black hole, I will walk unarmed with my hands tied into the Nemeton if it means getting him back," Derek says lowly.  "But I can't do that if I haven't slept for eight days, and I can't sleep without Stiles."</p>
            </blockquote>





	you're the only north star (dear god)

**Author's Note:**

> dear god, I was terribly lost

∆stardate21.03.2345/0506hr∆

 

Derek's bunk is empty.

 

When he'd woken from a heavily medicated nap a couple hours earlier, the sheets had been rumpled, had been the same sheets that he'd had on for weeks, and the pillow next to his had still smelled like Stiles.Derek had been able to close his burning eyes and let the residual effects of the sleeping pills numb his mind and imagine that if he just reached out over the barest whisper of an inch separating them, he could tangle their fingers together.

 

The bed has been remade since then.Derek stands in the raised doorway to his cabin, one knee resting on the bottom of the airlock, feels a thousand times more tired, like he's been awake for eons, not just eight days.This must be what it feels like to float through space, untethered and lost, one man amid the endless ineffable depth of the cosmos. 

 

He pulls the door closed again, then turns and walks back down the passageway.

 

∆stardate21.03.2345/0510hr∆

 

"I can't make her go any faster unless you want parts to start falling off into hyperspace," Lydia calls, from where she's buried waist-deep in the _Freewolf'_ s engine."I'm a mechanic, not a fucking miracle worker."

 

Derek helps himself to the open end of Lydia's workbench, hopping up onto it so that the bottoms of his boots just manage to skim the ground.It's sweltering in the engine room, and Derek's shirt clings to his skin with sweat after a few short minutes; suddenly, he wishes he were wearing something more like Lydia's tank top and cutoffs.

 

"Scott still thinks we should go to the Guard," he says without preamble.Neither of them need any context."I think Isaac is starting to agree with him."

 

Lydia sighs.She pulls herself out of the engine, brushes a long curl out of her face and leaves a smear of oil grease in its place, off-setting her bright pink lipstick."It's lucky neither of them are captain, then, isn't it?" she snaps.

 

Derek watches her as she saunters over to the work bench, pulls off her heavy gloves and throws them down on a disorganized pile of nuts and bolts.He feels trapped under her gaze, stifled in inactivity, but then, he's felt trapped for days, even though he has the fastest ship in the system and the most loyal crew in the universe.  

 

"Look, Captain," Lydia says.She leans against the table next to him, her manicured fingers tapping against the grimy surface, and tosses her ponytail back over one shoulder."Scott's a good kid, but he's an idiot.We're criminals.Fugitives.We probably have pretty hefty bounties on all our heads.The second we leave radio silence to try and hail the Guard, we will have automatically landed our own asses in lockup.Which means there will be no one to get Stiles, because even _if_ the Guard decides to go after him, they aren't going to bother recovering him in one piece."

 

Derek knows she's right.He doesn't say anything for a long moment, gazing hard at the steady movement of the gears within the ship's engine."They're scared," he says, finally."It's been over a week, he could be anywhere in the galaxy by now, and I haven't - "His words catch in his throat, and he closes his mouth around them,

 

"You haven't _nothing_ , Captain," Lydia says forcefully."We've cased twelve different trading posts in the past eight cycles, you've slept a grand total of five hours out of the past seventy two - "

 

"Were you the one who changed my bed?" Derek interrupts.  

 

Lydia visibly stumbles, her mouth hanging open for a moment before she gathers herself."You were moping," she says, defensive."Acting like we'd already lost him, which we absolutely have _not - "_

 

Derek hops down off the workbench, his weight shaking the grated gangway underneath them.Lydia's gaze shutters over, and she raises an accusatory eyebrow, picks her gloves back up."We're getting him back, Derek," she snaps.

 

Derek rounds on her, backing her up so that she's pressed against the table to lean away from him, maintaining a charged cushion of space between them."You don't think I fucking _know_ we're getting him back?" he growls."I will go to the ends of the known universe, I will dive through a fucking black hole, I will walk unarmed with my hands tied into the _Nemeton_ if it means getting him back."

 

He steps back, and Lydia visibly relaxes, her gloved hands unclenching from the edges of the table."But I can't do that if I haven't slept for eight days," Derek says lowly, "and I can't fucking sleep without Stiles."

 

∆stardate22.03.2345/2130hr∆

 

Scott hands him a battered breather, an expression of wide-eyed worry on his face."Are you sure you don't want me to go with you?" he asks, always the picture of naive insubordination."I'm pretty good at bashing skulls."

 

Derek flicks the switch on the side of his breather, and the thing rattles to life, stale-tasting air filtering into his mouth through the fine grate at the front."I want everyone on board in case another storm rolls in," he says, and his voice sounds tinny through the breather's rendering."We might have to get back into orbit quick.Besides, this isn't the kind of place where you want to try bashing any skulls."

 

The huge airlock door in front of him sounds a siren to indicate that it's about to retract, the noise reverberating deafeningly around the nearly-empty cargo hold.Derek clambers through into the pressurization chamber, and turns back to see Scott watching him from the other side, his arms crossed over his chest.

 

"I'll have the medbay ready," Scott calls over the blaring siren, as the airlock door begins to lower again, "in case you bring him back."Derek knows Scott has never quite trusted him with Stiles' life, but he doesn't have time to retaliate before the doors have sealed shut, and he's left alone in the small, quiet chamber.

 

For a moment, the only noise is the static draw of air through the breather.  

 

Then the airlock leading to the outside shudders and begins to screech open, a sliver of bright white light widening along with the opening.Derek squints against it, his leather jacket flapping around him as a blast of wind slams through the open door to batter around the pressurization chamber.

 

He steps out onto the mechanized landing ramp as it begins to unfold down towards the surface, and chases the end of it to jump the last few feet onto the packed sand.It crunches under his boots.

 

The meteorite crater around him is abustle with frantic activity, hunched figures moving from ship to ship in the gale-force winds, some with large packs strapped to their back, some bundled into the beds of hover carts.He moves out into the pandemonium, head bent so that his shoulders, under thick leather, take most of the force of the sand particles whipping about in the atmosphere.

 

It's a relief to reach the sanctuary of a long, flat ship.He has to duck into the airlock, but once he's in it closes quickly behind him with a sound like heavy suction, leaving him in total, shocking darkness.He pulls his breather away from his face, leaving it hanging around his neck.

 

In front of him in the pitch black, a screen flickers to life.A short sentence scrawls across the blue background in several languages, none of which Derek speaks, and a computerized voice says, "What is the password?"

 

Derek clears his throat, and does his best not to butcher the pronunciation." _Loup-garou_."  

 

The screen whirs, bars of blue and black and white rushing across it as it processes the word.It blinks out for a moment, then comes back on with a green light.The voice says, "Access granted."

 

The second airlock door begins to retract, revealing the high-ceilinged cargo hold beyond.Derek is assaulted with the gut-deep bass of the house music, some technotrash that fits the aesthetic of the makeshift club, the neon lights and mosh pit, reflective surfaces and scantily clad women of every color of the rainbow, some with horns, snake eyes, three fingered hands.

 

Derek shoves his way through the crowd.He can already see the back of a familiar shaven, tattooed head, and he makes a beeline for the side bar that Boyd's sitting at, his arm slung around a slim, topless green-skinned girl.He takes the stool next to his ex-crewmember, and yanks Boyd around to face him by the back of his jacket collar.

 

Boyd's hand moves for his blaster, but Derek pins his wrist down against the bar before he can reach it, his fingers a vicelike grip on Boyd's heated skin.The green-skinned girl on the other side of him squeals and skitters off into the crowd, and Boyd fixes Derek with a flat, dissatisfied glower.

 

"Now look what you've done, Derek," he drawls."Gone and scared off my plans for the night."He's not afraid of Derek, but he should be.Because Boyd may have been one of Derek's crew, once, but right now he's just a bump on the road from here to Stiles, and Derek has no qualms about steamrolling him.

 

"Cheating on your wife, Boyd?" he taunts.

 

Before Boyd can respond, Derek feels the sharp press of blaster at his back, the gentle sweep of long hair across the nape of his neck."We enjoy a little extramarital fun from time to time," Erica hums against his ear."Not that it's any of your fucking business."

 

The blaster at Derek's back jabs into his kidneys, and he fights a wince."Let go of Boyd," she hisses, "and maybe we can have a nice civil conversation like old friends ought to do."

 

"There was never anything civil about either of you," Derek says, but he releases Boyd's wrist.Boyd pulls away from him, rubbing the joint, and Derek feels the pressure of the blaster disappear from his back.

 

Erica saunters around to sit in Boyd's lap.There's no where to hide a blaster in her outfit, which is practically just a lot of well-placed duct tape and some creative makeup, but, perhaps on account of the outfit, no one in the club seems to mind that she has a giant gun holstered in plain sight on her bare hip.  

 

She tucks into Boyd's drink.Boyd slings his arms around her thin waist, tucks his chin over her shoulder, and looks like he's forcing himself to ask, "What do you need, Derek?"

 

Derek breathes deep, feels the weight of it stretch heavy across his shoulders."Stiles has been taken.I need to know if you've heard anything about where the _Alpha_ might be headed."

 

∆stardate22.03.2345/2327hr∆

 

Stiles had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

 

They've made these drops a million times.Package down, circle back for the money, get the hell back to the _Freewolf_ and get offworld before the Guard shows up.It's quick, it's painless, and they have it down to a science.

 

One of Isaac's old contacts had been able to dig up video footage of the drop a few days after, and Derek must have watched it a hundred times by now, sitting up through his sleep shift in the galley, alone except for the thin taste of instant coffee.  

 

From above, he watches as Stiles walks into the frame in a bright red jacket and a teenager's sneakers, sets a shiny silver briefcase down next to a bench amidst the crowded thoroughfare of the space port, and continues walking.Once he's off-screen, a man Derek recognizes by the severe set of his shoulders as Deucalion, captain of the _Alpha_ , retrieves the briefcase.He's not their client.

 

Deucalion is still there when Stiles returns for the money.Stiles' steps falter in surprise, and Derek can tell he's about to run, but before he can, a woman stands smoothly from the bench, turns, and brings a syringe to Stiles' neck.Kali.As Stiles falls, two more men, identical to each other, move out of the crowd to catch him, supporting him between them as all five of them disappear from the frame.

 

Derek hunches low over the tabletop vidscreen, his eyes rubbed red, three days worth of stubble scratched along his jaw."We should have checked what was in that package," he mutters over the rim of his mug.

 

∆stardate23.03.2345/0000hr∆

 

He tries to sleep in his bunk, but all it smells like now is laundry detergent and refiltered oxygen.

 

Turned on his side, he watches the clock on his desk tick over to 0:01.Ten days since Stiles was taken.Derek's limbs ache, his heart is a wrenched, knotted muscle, every time he closes his eyes he sees the curve of Stiles' smile, the crinkle around his eyes, the gentle rise-and-fall of his chest as he sleeps, and it _hurts_.

 

∆stardate23.03.2345/0456hr∆

 

Lydia wakes him from his non-sleep several hours later, her silhouette backlit in the door to his cabin, Jackson's old Guard jacket hung from her shoulders making her svelte form seem wider in the space the airlock allows.Her hair's down around her shoulders, and she looks tired, but there's a small, barely-there smile playing on her lips.

 

She steps carefully into the cabin and moves across the few feet of open space to sit on the edge of his bed.He watches her as she approaches, and he knows there's no point in trying to hide the swollenness around his eyes, the way the sheets at his sides have been bunched into fistfuls.He pushes himself up into a sitting position, his empty stomach curling, tightening to support him.

 

Lydia speaks quietly."Scott just got a vidcall from Kira.The client who was supposed to get that package just hired the _Foxfire_ to go get it back for him.Apparently they have friends in high places inside the Guard.She's sending over the last known coordinates for the _Alpha_."  

 

Every synapse in Derek's brain shocks violently to attention."Isaac plotted a course?"

 

Underneath him, he feels the _Freewolf_ shudder, strain, and start into a high-pitched thrum as it jumps to hyperspace.Lydia smirks full-on."We're on our way there as we speak, Captain."She pats his leg."Best get your guns.I don't imagine any of them are going to go down without a fight."

 

∆stardate24.03.2345/0843hr∆

 

"Can you bring us in without them seeing?"

 

Buckled into the pilot's chair, Isaac laughs, the sound somewhere between incredulous and helpless."Without _who_ seeing?" he says."It's a fucking party out there.Everyone and his mother seems to have shown up."

 

He's right.When Derek peers through the viewscreen into the asteroid field surrounding them, there's nothing to be seen but the faces of gargantuan chunks of space rock, but the radar monitor to his left pings of another ship's identifying beacon every couple of seconds as they inch towards Kira's coordinates.Derek recognizes the _Foxfire'_ s signature, recognizes the signature of a Guard patrol, and the third masked signal must be Deucalion _._  

 

"I'm mostly worried about the _Alpha_ ," Derek says, gripping the back of the pilot's chair to lean in close to Isaac's ear, "you know, the ship we're trying to board, here."

 

Isaac shoots him a short glare over his shoulder."Fine," he snarls.Derek will write all of this disrespectful behavior from his crew off later as stress."Going dark."

 

He reaches for the overhead panel and flips off a row of switches.The cockpit is plunged into darkness, the only light coming from the radar screen and the emergency exit guiding marks on the floor.Isaac operates just as smoothly in darkness as in light, knows each and every motion by heart as he eases them around the outside of a large asteroid.

 

"I don't have anywhere to land," Isaac says, "at least, not anywhere where I won't be twenty klicks away from where I dropped you a couple seconds later.I'm gonna have to do a flyby.You guys should suit up."

 

The ship rounds the asteroid, and through a momentary clearing in the asteroid field, Derek can see the looming form of the _Alpha_ ship, moored to the face of a pockmarked asteroid.Stiles is in there somewhere, definitely trapped and probably hurt, and Derek is about to rip his way through some of the galaxy's most dangerous criminals to get to him.As the _Alpha_ disappears again behind another asteroid, Derek feels strangely calm, the red wash of anger at the back of his mind a steady roar of white noise.  

 

"We have to do this quick," Isaac says."The _Foxfire_ is only twenty minutes out and closing.From what I've heard, Kira's dad likes to go in hard and fast, and doesn't really care about casualties.So, we probably want to have Stiles out before he gets here."

 

Derek slaps the back of the pilot's chair, and heads for the ladder out of the cockpit."Give us a five minute warning over the intercom," he says, swinging himself down onto the rungs, then dropping down onto the catwalk that stretches out far above the cargo hold.

 

Far below him, Scott and Jackson are already wrangling on their own suits.Derek's step falters on the grate above them, and, for the space of a breath, he allows the fears churning in the sectioned-off portion of his mind to punch through into consciousness.  

 

Because - they could be too late.Stiles could be dead already.The last time Derek ever sees him could have been across the table in the galley over breakfast, both of them half-asleep and Isaac puttering around in the corner, and Derek would never forgive himself if he'd missted his last chance to tell Stiles he loved him, _never_.The last time he ever touches him _can't_ have been then, can't have been that feather-light brush of the pads of his fingers against Stiles' neck as he fixed on his breather, the last time they made love can't have been early that fateful morning in the pale predawn synth light, lazy and languid, lips dragging into drowsy smiles, their skin in hazy warmth, because Derek is lost without Stiles, saved by him every day, needs him like he needs the light of a sun, oxygen in his lungs.And if he ever gets him back, _god,_ he's going to live every moment with Stiles like it's his last, because it could be - 

 

Isaac's voice comes over the _Freewolf'_ s grainy intercom."Five minutes to flyby, guys. _Foxfire_ is nineteen minutes out, and it looks like that Guard ship is starting its approach, too.I recommend you get in and out in the nine minutes it's going to take me to bring her back around."  

 

Derek blinks out of his thoughts, and slams them back down in the deep dark _what if_ corner of his mind, where they ought to stay for fucking good, because Stiles is over there and he's getting him back, or he's dying with him.

 

On the floor of the cargo hold, Jackson hefts Derek's space suit, a mess of yellow material that's been patched and resown and duct taped in a dozen places."Come on, Captain," Jackson calls up to him."Let's go and get your first officer back."

 

∆stardate24.03.2345/0849hr∆

 

Derek hits the hull of the _Alpha_ at a bone-jarring speed, and feels the magnetic landing gears in his gloves and boots latch on to the sleek steel exterior, anchoring him to the face.He hears two more bodies hit beside him, and looks over to see Jackson and Scott both latched onto the hull, only slightly below him.He detaches one hand, and motions upward, towards the bow of the ship, where the main exhaust is located.

 

They crawl low across the surface of the ship, their landing magnets clanking loudly in the silent expanse of the asteroid field.If there's anyone on the other side of the hull wall from them, there will no doubt be a welcoming committee of the violent variety waiting for them on the other side of the exhaust vent, but there're two blasters in holsters on Derek's thighs, and they don't have time for stealth.

 

The exhaust vent is covered by a round grate.Derek tries it with his hands, because sometimes he's lucky like that, but it holds fast.Jackson manoeuvers himself around on the other side of it, and pulls a torch cutter out of one of the blaster holsters on his suit.He cuts quickly around the perimeter of the grate, and the second he closes the glowing heated circle around the vent, Derek slips his fingers into the grate and pulls it away, letting it drift into space.

 

He slips into the vent feet-first, magnets disabled and gloved hands skimming the walls as he directs himself down.By the quiet scraping above his head, he knows Scott and Jackson are following him.  

 

His boots hit metal, and he crouches to feel around in the darkness beneath him.It's a fan, its blades turned and closed to make a solid metal surface.He knocks on it, the sound reverberating around the tube.Jackson hands him the torch cutter, and Derek makes short work of the fan.

 

As he pulls the fan out of the circle he's cut around it, there's a short alarm, and a touchpad screen on the wall of the vent lights up, bright red and assaulting their vision."Warning," it blares, "Artificial gravity disabled.Warning - "

 

Scott smashes the thing with the butt of his blaster.It fizzes, crackles, and falls silent.

 

Derek drops down into the next section of the vent.  

 

The final interior filter pops out easily when he kicks it.It doesn't clatter, just floats away into the hallway beyond, bumps gently into the opposite wall and continues on its redirected course.Derek pushes himself out into the passage, activates his mag boots mid-arch, and feels his feet pulled sharply down to latch onto the steel gangway, Jackson and Scott touching down heavily behind him.

 

Derek pulls his goggles up onto his forehead, pulls his breather down to hang around his neck."From outside it looked like the cargo hold is in the keel."

 

Jackson takes a deep breath over his breather."You think that's where they're keeping him?"

 

"That's where I'd keep a prisoner.No brig on a transport ship."He draws his blaster, turns the safety off, and holds it ready at his side."Let's move.T-minus six minutes to the _Freewolf_ 's flyby."

 

They move off on through the passageway at a jog, heavy mag boots making each step feel like five.The ship is laid out much the same as Derek's, and he leads them easily through it, avoiding anywhere they might run into _Alpha_ crewmembers.In the end, it was luck that the artificial grav was disabled, because anyone inside has now either been forced to go find mag boots or else navigate by floating; but that luck can only last for so long.

 

Derek rounds a corner, his footsteps each sounding like its own hundred-man landing party in sheer volume of noise, and comes face to face with a pair of mean-looking refitted blasters.He plants his heel, twists, and manages to tackle Jackson and Scott back around the corner as the blasters fire, deafening in the close quarters of the hallway.  

 

They hit the floor and bounce off it, their boots disengaged.Derek sees the twins round the corner as he's upside down, registers the bright flash of light as they fire again, clipping Scott's shoulder as he struggles to get his feet underneath him.Derek's boots catch on the ceiling, and he looks down on Jackson hauling Scott upright while firing off shots with one hand, holding the twins at the corner.

 

Jackson looks up at him."Go!" he shouts."We've got this, Captain! Go get Stiles!"

 

Derek starts moving upside down along the passageway, the sounds of blasterfire following him down the tubular hall.He makes the last two turns to the cargo bay doors unimpeded, then disengages his mag boots long enough to drop down to the floor.His blaster makes short work of the computer lock on the doors, and he crouches down to hoist them up, thighs and biceps straining under the resistance of the door's gears. 

 

The wide, mostly empty expanse of the cargo bay greets him on the other side of the doors.It's dark, a single light leaking in from somewhere among the upper catwalks, blocked by hanging hoist lines and struts, but there's a slumped, thin form lashed to the wall at the other end of the hold, in a tattered red jacket and teenagers' sneakers.

 

"Stiles," Derek says.His voice breaks.

 

Stiles looks up at him, and Derek's heart _splits_ open in relief, because there's a nasty yellow bruise blooming across the side of Stiles' face, a gash at his hairline, and one of his ankles is at a weird angle, but he's breathing.He's alive, and he's the best thing Derek has ever seen in his life.

 

"Derek," Stiles says back, his voice raspy and panicked."Kali - "

 

Something cracks against the back of Derek's head, and he goes down hard.

 

∆stardate24.03.2345/0903hr∆

 

Stiles is saying his name.  

 

Derek comes back to consciousness gently, like surfacing from a shallow pool of water.Stiles' voice coils like warmth around his mind, eases him back from the jagged edge of pain and coaxes his eyelids to flutter open under the glare of a harsh, reality-biting fluorescent synth light.

 

He's lying on the floor of the cargo hold with his head in Stiles' lap, his wrists bound and hands bent uncomforatbly underneath him.Stiles is bent over him, his warm brown eyes fixed on Derek's, and for a long minute, Derek is perfectly at peace, the rumbling of an enemy ship underneath them and reassurances ringing in the rugged terrain of his bashed head that they might get to die together, now.

 

Stiles' lips are moving around words, his expression concerned and cornered but still backlit by a fiery defiance.As Derek's vision clarifies, so does his hearing, and he can make out a littany of curses and soft pleas and what sounds like a frantic sort of sit rep pouring in a jumble past Stiles' clumsy lips.

 

"The absolute worst rescuer ever," Stiles is saying, his hands gentle on the sides of Derek's head, thumbs moving in anxious circles over Derek's skin."You get yourself captured, show up guns blazing with the fucking _Guard_ on your tail, how'd you manage that? I mean, at least you brought a laser with you, but I singed the back of my neck trying to cut these chains with my hands tied behind my back - "

 

Derek reaches up his hands to grab Stiles', fitting their fingers together.Stiles breaks off to smile down at him, a dopey lopsided grin that feels like reenergizing a dark sun, after so many days in the blackness."Nice of you to return to the land of the living, sunshine," he mumbles.He squeezes Derek's hands.

 

"What's happening?" Derek croaks."Kali - "

 

"The _Alpha_ crew are all preoccupied at the moment, seeing as they've just been boarded by the Guard," Stiles says in a rush."I just didn't want to try carrying you out of here on my own, since you eat bricks on the regular and there's a lot of blasterfire going on out there, and also I'm pretty sure my ankle is broken."

 

Derek's mag boots are anchored to the place where the wall meets the floor, and Stiles has a leg hooked around his waist to keep from floating away into the dark hold; they're both currently floating a few inches off the floor, and Derek isn't exacly eager to see what kind of manoeuverability two men with one pair of mag boots are going to be able to employ under fire.

 

"Scott and Jackson came in with me," Derek starts to say, but all of his thoughts are thin and whispy and he doesn't know where he was trying to go with that sentence."We had nine minutes - "

 

"I'm going to take a wild guess and say that any sort of schedule you came in with has now been blown to shit," Stiles interrupts him."At this point, our best bet may be to sit tight and wait for the Guard to come arrest us - "

 

Before he can finish that truly motivational train of thought, a small someone brandishing a blinding green light and a small Guard regulation blaster comes bowling into the bay at a strange angle, running by pushing deftly off the supports in the hall wall.Derek goes for his own blaster, but the holsters are empty, probably courtesy of Kali, and he can't do anything but sit there and wait for the _freeze, hands where I can see them!_  

 

It never comes.Instead, a female voice calls out, "Scott, they're in here!"

 

Derek hears Scott come clunking down the hallway before he can even see him.When he rounds the corner and catches sight of them, the smile that splits his face is huge."Stiles!" he shouts, and continues lumbering towards them across the wide expanse of the cargo bay.

 

The female Guardsman pulls her way towards them along the hoist cables interspersed throughout the bay, her light still out but her blaster holstered at her side.Scott crouches in front of him, his image swimming and tilting in Derek's light-pained view, and locks a hand around Stiles' shoulder."Jackson's holding an exit open for us, but we have to get moving," he says.

 

"'Moving' isn't really high on the list of our collective abilities right now, Scotty," Stiles says sarcastically.

 

 Scott gives him a _duh_ look, which is completely unwarranted given the current situation."I told you about my friend Allison, right?"

 

Stiles is grinning back the same dopey grin as Scott."The granddaughter of the head Guardsman Allison?" he asks."Only about a million times."He looks over at her."It _is_ nice to finally meet you, though."

 

Allison smiles a radiant smile, despite the blood smeared across her forehead."I wish these were nicer circumstances," she says, apologetically like it's actually her fault, "but hopefully I can be of some help to you guys."

 

∆stardate24.03.2345/1542hr∆

 

Derek is in the galley pouring Stiles a bowl of never-expire Fruit Loops.  

 

He feels a hand slide over his shoulder, and turns just in time to catch a full-bodied hug from Lydia.She wraps her arms around his neck, rocks up on her toes, her curly, strawberry-smelling hair tickling his face, and says quietly, "We got him back, Captain.He's home, he's okay."

 

She pulls away from him, and Derek is blinking back tears, moisture heavy on his eyelashes.Her hands smooth over his cheeks, and she pulls him down so she can reach and presses a kiss to his forehead, lingering for a long moment before releasing him.  

 

Derek twines his arm around her waist and buries his face in her shoulder."Thank you," he says.

 

∆stardate24.03.2345/2036hr∆

 

Stiles sighs against his skin, his lips hot and wet against the side of Derek's neck.His nails dig gently into the back of Derek's shoulders, grounding and real like the soft sounds he keens with every rock of Derek's hips against his, like the hum of the _Freewolf'_ s engine deep below them, the creak of their bunk underneath them.

 

Their pants have been shoved down around their knees, tangled with the bedsheets that smell like Stiles again, and the slow, heady drag of skin against skin has scattered Derek's thoughts across the reaches of the known universe, has left nothing but the strong staccato beat of Stiles' heart against Derek's chest and the curve of his spine under Derek's hands, the certainty of there being no space left between them at all.

 

Derek nuzzles his face into Stiles' neck and punctuates sucking an open-mouthed kiss to the soft skin behind Stiles' ear with a sharp roll of his hips, grinding with amazing friction against Stiles.Stiles moans like it's been punched out of him, buries a hand in Derek's hair to keep him where he is, and says, " _Fuck_ , Derek, do that again."

 

He does it again, and again, Stiles moving to meet him in disjointed rhythm until they're both breathing hard, both unable to control the frantic movements of their hips and the words that tumble past their lips, mouths pressed together so that every sentiment passes straight from one to the other, so that when Derek breathes, "I love you," onto Stiles' tongue, it's muffled under the soul-swallowing sound Stiles makes as he comes.Derek follows him a heartbeat later, his teeth playing at the tendon where Stiles' shoulder meets his neck, Stiles' hands soothing over his broad shoulders, the curve of his ass, the back of his head.

 

He slumps down against Stiles' side, but he doesn't roll away, doesn't let Stiles roll away, anchors him there with their still-entwined legs and an arm over Stiles' midsection.He pulls Stiles in close and kisses him, feels Stiles smile against his lips, his arms wrapped around Derek as far as they'll go as he melts across the narrow bunk into him.

 

Derek pulls away just enough to be able to speak, and see Stiles' vibrant, starry eyes blink out from under incredibly long lashes."I love you," he murmurs again, and tilts his head forward for a loose-lipped kiss."I'm so fucking lost without you, Stiles," his voice catches, and he closes his eyes, leans his forehead against Stiles', "I don't know what I would do - I _can't_ \- "

 

He feels Stiles' fingers card through his hair, feels impossibly small and insignificant, still just one man spinning out through space with the light of a blazing star to light his way.Stiles laughs, an airy huff against Derek's wet mouth."I know for a fact," he says softly, "that this ship has an incredible database of starmaps.I think you'd manage to find your way."

 

Derek shakes his head, and latches his mouth back over Stiles, taking solace for a long moment in the familiar taste of him, the familiar push-and-pull of their lips and tongues.  

 

"No," he says, finally."I don't ever want to find out if I could live without you."

 

Stiles rolls them over so that his weight is pressing Derek into the rumpled sheets, so that he has the leverage to bend his head down and kiss Derek thoroughly."We probably should have chosen a less dangerous profession, then," he mumbles, when he draws back, a lopsided smirk on his face."Gardening, maybe."

 

Derek laughs, and pulls him back down.

 


End file.
